Bobbleheads, from Labatt's drinking and driving awareness campaign.
Created
There is something about the latest instalment of Labatt's responsible drinking series - part of the brewer's ongoing "Know When to Draw the Line" campaign - that makes it difficult to watch but hard to turn away from.
The collection of eight clever spots from Toronto creative Agency 59 is titled "Crash Bobbles" and features five chatty bobble-head characters - Ric, Jen, Kat, Rashid and Denny. The bobble friends clearly like to party, as the kids say, but from the first Webisode's opening moments, it is apparent that something has gone terribly wrong.
Denny is perched on a psychiatrist's couch, lamenting that he hasn't been the same "in the bedroom" since the accident. The cracks in his ceramic head seem permanent. Kat, who is in a band and used to play guitar, is missing both her arms and searching in vain for a new instrument to master - head-banger cymbals anyone? Ric comes off as the gang's loudmouthed galute, but we learn he has suffered terrible brain trauma. Rashid used to be a heck of a basketball player, but with only one arm he's been demoted to towel boy. Jen, Ric's girlfriend, has a yawning hole in her noggin. They socialize at myriad high-boozing functions - Homecoming, Halloween, the Long Weekend and Holiday Party, and exchange gallows humour.
Maybe it's just our age and highly attuned sense of squeamishness for jokes about gaping holes in heads and missing limbs, but the spots make us feel a little, well, uncomfortable. Exactly as a well-crafted drunk driving awareness ad should.
Quoted
- Chuck Porter
Zig has zagged into the sunset. The mid-sized Toronto agency, whose clients include IKEA, Burt's Bees and Molson Canada, announced Thursday it has been absorbed by the hotshot ad firm Crispin Porter + Bogusky, a corporate sibling in Miles Nadal's MDC Network.
"The opportunity to be a part of CP+B and to contribute our own thought leadership will enable us to deliver the smartest, most innovative work for our clients as well as those of CP+B," said Shelley Brown, who segues from president of zig to the CEO of the newly rebranded CP+B Canada. Zig's CEO Andy Macauley becomes the new office's chairman and Aaron Starkman, zig's chief creative officer who had been unsuccessfully targeted for recruitment in the past by CP+B, was named the Toronto office's executive creative director.
Based in Miami, Boulder, Colo., and Gothenberg, Sweden, CP+B has a reel full of groundbreaking work for high-profile brands including Burger King, Microsoft, Domino's Pizza and Old Navy.
"One of the reasons this is exciting for us is that Toronto is a great creative resource," said Chuck Porter in an interview, shortly after making the announcement to the zig staff. "We don't really open offices necessarily where our clients are. We open offices where we believe talent wants to live, and Toronto is one of those places. So I think it's going to be a great resource for all of CPB's clients. That will change the complexion of zig. There are going to be people at zig who are working on things like Microsoft and other big global accounts and that'll change things here."
Some changes are promising: within minutes of the announcement, samples of zig's work had taken over the front page of CP+B's Website. Others less so: citing geographic duplication, the agency said its Chicago office, which currently has about eight full-time employees, will be wound down.
Noting that CP+B snagged a Titanium award at the Cannes Lions last month for its interactive work for Best Buy and was named Interactive Agency of the Year, Mr. Porter suggested zig might benefit from its new mother ship's digital know-how and said there likely would be a number of people from its other offices relocating to Toronto. "I'm hoping we'll be able to cross-pollinate with Toronto a lot."